Geographic tokenism on editorial boards: a content analysis of highly ranked communication journals
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose Research posits that the overrepresentation of certain countries from the Global North contributes to the geographical disparity in knowledge production within communication, media and journalism. Our study sets out to understand geographic tokenism in academia by analyzing the editorial boards of 30 highly ranked journals in communication, media, and journalism studies. We sought to explore if certain institutions and academics from underrepresented regions were overrepresented on journal editorial boards. Methodology We content analyzed the members of the editorial boards of 30 highly ranked communication, media and journalism studies journals. From our coded data we were able to identify the individual’s name, role on the editorial board, institutional affiliation, and country of institutional affiliation. Chi square, Pearson’s correlation, and Hierarchical linear modeling were used in analyzing our data. Findings Our study found that institutions and academics affiliated to institutions in the Global South are woefully underrepresented on journal editorial boards. On the other hand, we report an overrepresentation of a small number of institutions and scholars from the Global South across the sampled journals in instances where there is representation from the underrepresented regions on journal editorial boards. Practical implications Our results show that a journal with more diversity on editorial boards and editorial roles is associated with higher journal ranking. Social implications The social implications of our findings rests in the fact that tokenism can impede the diversity of thought that is necessary to move beyond the thorny idea of Western-centered scholarship being considered normative. Originality Whereas previous studies have analyzed editorial boards, our study is unique because it includes institutional and individual level analyses of journal editorial board members in our analysis of geographical disparities in knowledge production.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it